Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This is on Obama's 2024 summer reading list as well as on the short list for the National Book Award, so some very good recommendations indeed. On top of that, someone who I very much admire started talking to me about it at a party, and midway into the conversation, I realized that I had started it but not finished it, I had that much trouble with it (he, not so much--he was so enthused about it, and he is far closer to the age of the author, so it is entirely possible that I just do not get it). Cyrus, the son of an Iranian migrant factory worker in Indiana, lost his mother in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when a US missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war. This formative trauma has left a terrible legacy: when we meet him, in his late 20s, he’s a recovering alcoholic, struggling with fragile mental health and an unhealthy dependency on pharmaceutical sedatives; he is a troubled young man searching for a reason to live. he story is set in 2017 but the narrative intermittently skips back in time, revisiting Cyrus’s childhood in Indiana and his parents’ life in late 1980s Iran. Growing up as a bisexual Iranian in the American Midwest, he cultivated a sort of invisibility in order to get by. An aspiring but unproductive writer, Cyrus has a fixation with martyrdom, and is researching a book on the subject. To this end he travels to New York and interviews an older, terminally ill Iranian artist, Orkideh, at the Brooklyn Museum. They strike up a tender rapport, and Cyrus gradually begins to work through his issues. The story’s disparate elements are neatly interwoven, even if the plot device that sets up the resolution is a little far-fetched.